Politico: ‘Scour Breitbart’ for ‘Clues’ About Trump Policy

Getty ImagesBREITBART NEWS24 Nov 2016

Politico’s Nahal Toosi scours Breitbart News’s national security articles and op-eds for clues about the incoming Trump administration’s foreign policy, noting in particular Breitbart’s decidedly pro-Israel and anti-radical Islamic terror stance. Though Breitbart’s former Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon is on a leave of absence to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Toosi writes that “foreign and domestic” observers “will likely scour Breitbart every day for clues about what the administration will do.”

With Bannon suiting up to be Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, he is likely to have significant influence on how Trump deals with Britain and the rest of the world in the coming four years. One way of understanding Bannon’s approach to foreign policy is to read the coverage he inspired and oversaw at Breitbart.

POLITICO scoured hundreds of foreign policy-related articles published by Breitbart News from mid-2012 to mid-2016, during which Bannon led the site, to get a sense of his worldview. While by no means a perfect measure — Breitbart is a platform for many people, and it relies heavily on aggregation — Bannon nonetheless served as the site’s chief editorial strategist, setting the tone and priorities for its coverage before joining the Trump campaign in August.

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In many ways, how Breitbart has covered the planet is in line with Bannon’s vision of the world as he himself laid it out in a 2014 speech recently published by BuzzFeed. In that speech, Bannon warned of a rising Islamist jihadist threat and praised populist movements gaining traction worldwide.

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Even if Bannon has zero input into what the site publishes from here on, observers, foreign and domestic, will likely scour Breitbart every day for clues about what the administration will do.